Philly Judo and BJJ Cup - Competition

Judo

I only had one other guy in my division and he was much better than me. He is a left hander with a strong left sided stance. I was talking to Lex and he said this guy has been running through everyone at 198 for a few months now. I am normally very critical of my performance and I often get really mad if I lose to someone I think I should have beaten. That is not the case here, in this case this guy was just better than I am right now. I think if we had 10 matches I would have gone 0-10 against him. I need a strategy to get this guy on the ground and work a ground attack. That is probably my only chance against him right now.

BJJ

We started out with 2 decent sized purple belt divisions. I we had 3 middle weights and 3 heavy weights. Unfortunately due to various reason one had to drop from each division. That left us with 2 really light guys and two really heavy guys. We probably could have done 1 absolute division if we knew ahead of time, but the lighter guys were a lot lighter so I am not sure how well that would have gone over. Instead we did it best of three style. My opponent was another guy from my club. I really give him a lot of props for stepping up an fighting, it would have been really easy for him to back out and ask for his money back. He also agreed to a best o three rather than a simple one and done.

I was happy with the matches and I won them both. I threw in the first match and pulled guard in the second. I am pretty comfortable pulling guard , but getting a throw and landing on top will always be my primary strategy. This was only my third time ever pulling guard in a tournament. I bet I am one of the few BJJ purple belts that can count the number of tournament guard pulls on one hand. I am not really sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing... :)